Musicians
“Branded Wherever I Go” was written by Roy Acuff and recorded by Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys in 1941. It is a prison song of a particular kind: the singer is a former convict who tells the one he loves not to wait for him, because the mark of his past will follow him wherever he goes.
That theme — shame and a record that cannot be outrun — gave the song a bleak power, and it circulated through country music in the years after Acuff’s recording, taken up by performers including the young George Jones.
The Earls of Leicester recorded “Branded Wherever I Go” on their 2016 album Rattle and Roar. The band is devoted to the sound of the classic Flatt and Scruggs era, and the song fits that mission — a hard, plain-spoken piece of early country brought into a precise bluegrass setting.
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